YOUTILITY

Why Smart Marketing Is About Help, Not Hype

The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters are critically important to your company’s success.

You’re not competing for attention only against other, similar products. You’re competing for attention against everything. To win in this hyper-competitive environment, you must ask “How can we help?”

If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life. This is Youtility.

Includes interviews with dozens of companies practicing Youtility, and provides 6 blueprints for building Youtility in your company.

Available for pre-order soon (get up to 7 exclusive bonuses) at http://YoutilityBook.com

5 Reputation Management Lessons from Prince, Dell and Beyond

Difficulties arise. Mistakes happen. Reputations become tarnished — this is the way of the world, particularly when an error occurs after a company brand achieves a leadership position or a human being becomes famous. As we’ve seen time and time again, when a problem is avoided or “hushed up,” the blemish becomes more pronounced. But [...]

Continue Reading

Nobody Said Social Media Should Be Simple

Simple isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Social media is unique in that it is the only medium yet conceived where companies are playing in the exact same sandbox as we’re playing personally. Your employees and customers aren’t making TV ads on the weekend. Nor are they making their own magazine ads for fun [...]

Continue Reading

The Fallacy of Round the Clock Social Media

Guest post by Chris Hall an interactive content specialist at Off Madison Ave who specializes in writing for humans, not robots. It’s 11PM and the world around you is getting ready for bed. As a mobile obsessive, you instinctually check your Facebook, Twitter and all the rest of your social media accounts while you brush [...]

Continue Reading

Speak No Evil – Why Trust Isn’t a 4 Letter Word in Social Media

Now is the summer of our discontent. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For social media, one hand giveth (instant spread of the Bin Laden news) while the other hand taketh away (seemingly daily stories about a company or person doing it “wrong”). The most egregious occurrence of late [...]

Continue Reading

Debating the Future of Social Media Management

Join Mark W. Schaefer (whose {GROW} blog is a must-read) and me for a fireside chat about social media centralization vs. decentralization. While Mark and I agree about nearly everything, we have a difference of opinion on one particular topic: social media management and the role that social media will play within organizations. I contend [...]

Continue Reading

Blinded by the White: Social Media and Diversity

Over the past couple weeks, two events got me thinking. At South by Southwest in Austin, I was at several events attended by the “social media mafia” – the 300 or so folks that create much of the content around social media nationally. Bloggers, consultants, community managers, et al. There are of course many excellent [...]

Continue Reading

Why Social Success is No Accident

If you read Convince & Convert on even an occasional basis, you know that I’m firmly in the social integration camp. You need to focus on how to “be” social as a company, and worry less about how to “do” social. This is because social touches do not occur in isolation. I’ve seen a LOT [...]

Continue Reading

3 Key Roles to Make Your Social Team Scalable

One of the continuous discussions and questions surfacing in the social media chatterbox is that of “who owns social media?” Is it marketing? Public relations (PR)? Customer service? The answer is . . . yes. For the long-term, anyway. You’re not likely at the point yet where you have social media wired into everything. Right [...]

Continue Reading

The New Small – How Technology Levels the Playing Field

Phil Simon is a technology cupid. Whatever your company’s issues or objectives, he can recommend the optimal platform, rollout strategy, and operational considerations. In his work as a tech consultant, he’s realized the days of “big iron” – solving problems with huge, expensive systems are gone. Now, it’s the nimble, inexpensive technology that rules. So [...]

Continue Reading

The Dirty Secrets of Time, Priorities, and Honesty

I hate excuses. And the one I despise most of all is “I don’t have time.” Bullshit. You can find the time. It exists. You choose not to devote the time, and there’s a big difference. I don’t work out. (people that have met me in person are LOLing about the understated nature of that [...]

Continue Reading